February 2016 Meeting

February 2016 Meeting

Join Us!

Our next HASUG meeting will be on Thursday, February 18 at UCONN Farmington Campus from 8:30 am (coffee and conversation) with speakers from 9:00 am onwards. The event is at the Cell and Genome Sciences Building, 400 Farmington Avenue, Farmington, CT (map). Parking is free, but please park in locations marked as Area 3. When you pull into the driveway, turn right and drive past the building. There is a large parking lot there.

We presently have 2 speakers from UCONN, and a 3rd speaker from the Southeast SAS Users Group, which serves numerous states in the southern US. We will provide more information on the SESUG speaker in upcoming blasts and on our website.

* If you are having any difficulties with the registration form, please contact us instead.
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First Speaker …

“Where to begin? Developing and leveraging novice users”

Data management teams typically include support staff who have been selected and hired for their attention to detail and patience with meticulous tasks, but who are not necessarily fluent in SAS. Formal training can be expensive and unnecessary for users of this type. We have developed and initiated our own basic SAS training program for programming and research assistants, which provides a toolkit of essentials for new and infrequent users to explore, interpret process and summarize data independently. We will describe our method and experience to date.

Melissa Hill is a clinical programmer at Cd3 Inc. where she performs and supports the design and programming of clinical data structures related to drug development. Prior to her position at Cd3 she worked as an epidemiologist at the Yale Center for Perinatal Pediatric and Environmental Epidemiology, functioning as programmer, field study coordinator, and research associate. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Villanova University and Masters of Public Health from Yale University.

Julie Kezik is a biostatistician at the Yale Center for Perinatal, Pediatric and Environmental Epidemiology, where she focuses on providing statistical analysis and research support for epidemiological studies of environmental exposures and early childhood health outcomes. Kezik’s current work uses a combination of measured data, traffic information, and health outcomes to aide in the development of interventions which will improve health. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Sociology and a Master of Science in Research, Statistics and Measurement from Southern Connecticut State University.

Second Speaker …

“Propensity score methods in observational studies.”

Yinghui Duan, M.Sc is a Ph.D student in public health at Department of Community Medicine and Healthcare, University of Connecticut Health Center. She will discuss the applications of propensity score methods in observational studies. She will also present macros that can be used to match case with control based on propensity score, and to evaluate balance in post-matching sample.

Third Speaker …

You have an input file with one record per month, but need an output file with one record per year. But you cannot use PROC TRANSPOSE because other fields need to be retained or the input file is sparsely populated. The techniques shown in this paper will enable you to be able to either consolidate or expand your output stream of data by using arrays. Sorted files of data records can be processed as a unit using “BY Variable” groups and building an array of records to process. This technique allows access to all of the data records for a “BY Variable” group and gives the programmer access to the first, last and all records in between at the same time. This will allow the selection of any data value for the final output record.

William E. Benjamin, Jr. his expertise includes Base SAS® Software, and SAS Macros. William has a BS degree in computer science from Arizona State University and an MBA from Western International University. He has been a SAS software user since 1983 and a computer programmer since 1973. His programming experience spans from vacuum tube mainframes, to current PC computers. William currently owns a consulting company called OWL Computer Consultancy, LLC in Phoenix AZ. His new SAS Press book titled “Exchanging Data between SAS and Microsoft Excel: Tips and Techniques to Transfer and Manage Data More Efficiently” is now available.